Starbucks Listens To Customers, Brings Back Some Less-Fancy Baked Goods

Have the pastry offerings at your local Starbucks gotten too fancy-pantsy for you in recent years? Do you miss having a slice of lemon cake with your coffee? Apparently you’re not alone, as the coffee colossus has heeded the call of complaining customers and decided to bring back foods that had been deemed not sexy enough by the chain.

“We’ve got a few products that we are going to bring back from the old menu,” Starbucks COO Troy Alstead — who is not an astronaut or a superhero-in-disguise, in spite of the name — tells Bloomberg. “Some customers missed a few things.”

The changes began a couple years back, when Starbucks acquired pastry company La Boulange in an attempt to gussy up its baked goods selection. Out were some of the old favorites like coffee cake, double-chocolate brownies, banana, pumpkin, and the previously mentioned lemon cake.

Customers not only pined for the treats they’d grown to crave, but also complained about the new items being too tiny and too expensive.

And so Starbucks is bringing back some older menu items, but they may not be exactly as you remember them. The company tells Bloomberg that some will be new La Boulange recipes that are similar to what you used to buy.

Bloomberg reports that some returning menu items will be on the smaller side compared to the sweet bricks of goodness you used to purchase. Of course that means fewer calories. Like the blueberry scone that’s about 17% smaller in size, resulting in 70 fewer calories, or the banana-pecan walnut loaf cake that is about 9% smaller than old version, but has 90 fewer calories.

As The Who said, “Meet the new banana cake. Same as the old banana cake.” Or something like that.